"Everyone" know that Apache is for Linux/Unix and on Windows IIS is the way to go.

However, I'm not a pro at Linux and it would be an enormous relief for me to use just the same setup in the production environment that I use during development. I'm a solo developer and I'm trying to make things as simple as possible. I've already got rid of other issues like storage (->cloud) emails (->postmark).

So, what are the real drawbacks that can happen when I just put Apache in Windows virtual private server from Rackspace and use it as the main production environment for a PHP project? Money for more VPS resources is not that big issue compared to the possibility of not having to learn a different OS.

Super-heavy traffic is not expected. Also my PHP project can be quite optimized. There are some heavy scripts, but only for the inside (logged) users. All else can be served more or less statically.

Its just that Apache ans PHP was just not deigned for the closed nature of windows, and hence preforms much better on Unix systems. I suppose that if its a small install it should be ok. I would still highly recommend leaving windows altogether and going for linux. A good place to start is with Ubuntu.

What has to do the design of Apache and PHP with "the closed nature of Windows"? They don't need to access the "open source nature of *nix" to run. Both actually run perfectly fine on both OSs. You probably need more resources than you would need on *nix, but if your server has them, and you are using a server version of Windows, you can expect the same good performance on both. I've been actually running projects on both OSs, which mirror each other on general configuration for Apache, PHP/Perl and MySQL, and I get the same good performance on any of them.
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Francisco ZarabozoMay 18 '13 at 5:19